Zweig wrote: "It is time to call owning gold what it is: an act of faith."

And yet, as gold researcher and GATA consultant Ronan Manly pointed out today in a note to your secretary/treasurer, authorities even higher than The Wall Street Journal seem to have a different opinion.

... Dispatch continues below ...

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Manly, who is always examining documentation about gold rather than merely pontificating about it as mainstream financial journalists do, called attention to contrary assertions on the Internet site of London Precious Metals Clearing Ltd. --

-- which manages the over-the-counter gold market in London, the largest in the world (at least for the time being).

In the "About Clearing" section of its Internet site, London Precious Metals Clearing Ltd. says:

"The six London bullion clearing members each maintain confidential secure vaulting facilities within central London locations, using either their own premises or those of a secure storage agent, which are used to process and store precious metals (mostly gold and silver), for both the member and those clients who require custodial storage (including some central banks). ...

"[T]hese vaulting facilities enable the depositories to process large physical transactions with a high degree of confidentiality (essential given the sensitivity many governments and central banks place on gold transactions); also, these vaults provide the potential of some modest income from client storage requirements.

"There are close ties between the vault operations and the precious metal trading and sales team on physical movements, particularly when scheduling consignment stock deliveries, but also where key government or central bank physical transactions are being undertaken, which require sensitive and confidential handling, and often involve taking high-security precautions."

The clearing association's assertions raise a couple of questions:

1) Why are central banks and governments so sensitive and secretive about what are supposedly only pet rocks?

2) Are there any circumstances under which Zweig and The Wall Street Journal (and, for that matter, the rest of the mainstream financial news media) would be honest about gold?

Though readers of these dispatches must be tiring of hearing it, still it must be said and may have to be said for decades to come:

No analysis of the gold market is worth anything if it fails to address these questions:

-- Are central banks in the gold market surreptitiously or not?

-- If central banks are in the gold market surreptitiously, is it just for fun -- for example, to see which central bank's trading desk can make the most money by cheating the most investors -- or is it for policy purposes?

-- If central banks are in the gold market for policy purposes, are these the traditional purposes of defeating a potentially competitive world reserve currency, or have these purposes expanded?

-- If central banks, creators of infinite money, are surreptitiously trading a market, how can it be considered a market at all, and how can any country or the world ever enjoy a market economy again?

-- but of course not yet in Zweig's column or elsewhere in The Wall Street Journal, though the documentation has been delivered to the newspaper many times over many years, once even in person by your secretary/treasurer by appointment at the paper's headquarters in New York. A few years before that, GATA even spent $264,000 to place a full-page advertisement in the newspaper to alert it and the nation to the rigging of the gold market: